“Legion Field” summary In early fall, 1964, the narrator, Wendell Flake, an imaginative and perhaps psychotic 13-year-old, has just moved into a blue-collar neighborhood in Boston. During his first day at his new school he falls in love with Beat, a pretty girl in his class. He also meets Vignot, a towering, malodorous pariah and nerdy genius. Though he doesn’t know it, he falls in love with him, too. Leaving school, Wendell sees two boys, Sylvia and Bona, bullying and assaulting Vignot. Vignot accepts the attack meekly, until Sylvia tries to tear up his secret notebook, “The Book of Undoing.” Vignot grabs Sylvia by the neck and nearly chokes him to death. The bullies flee, but Vignot spots Wendell and asks him to drop by his house the following morning. Wendell takes the address, leaves quickly and gets lost. In an addled state of mind he runs into his mother, dressed as a nun, who chastises him. The next morning Wendell decides to take up Vignot’s invitation and visits. In Vignot’s attic bedroom they play board games that simulate historical and hypothetical military conflicts. Intoxicated by his host’s exotic libations, Wendell finds himself vividly imagining the battles. After the game Vignot escorts Wendell to the bus stop via a shortcut through Legion Field. They stumble upon Bona apparently attempting to rape Beat. Furious, Wendell clouts Bona with a bat found in the field. The other person disappears and the two friends flee, leaving Bona for dead. Wendell returns home and interrupts his parents listening to the rosary on the radio. They are unconvinced by his far-fetched attempts to explain his lateness and inebriation. Hungover at Mass the next morning, Wendell slips away after a eucharistic emergency. Sylvia spots him at the exit and offers him a rendezvous with Beat in exchange for Vignot’s address. Wendell reluctantly complies but doesn’t believe that the girl Sylvia introduces him to is really Beat. Fraught with guilt, he runs to Legion Field only to see his friend thrown down a well, presumably to his death. The next morning at school, Beat, Bona, and Vignot are all absent. Traumatized by panic, loss, and guilt, Wendell tries to put out his eye with a pencil. Policemen take him to a psychiatric hospital. There he is admitted by the eccentric Dr. Novo, who prescribes “the electric treatment.” While in the hospital Wendell talks with a girl who looks like Beat, though his memory of her face, and his memories in general, has faded from the shock treatments. While carting laundry for “occupational therapy” he is horrified to learn that he has been performing that job for several weeks, none of which he remembers. Armed with a stolen pistol, assisted by a fellow patient and the mystery girl who he is now convinced is Beat, he escapes. As he leaves he thinks he hears Beat tell him that she will meet him in Legion Field. Desperate, Wendell heads for Vignot’s house, and is shocked to see that his friend is still alive. Vignot explains how the well is the entrance to an old system of tunnels. Relieved that his friend doesn’t seem to know about his betrayal, Wendell agrees to play a game Vignot has invented. It follows the same rules as the other games but takes place in the real world. After a few turns Wendell proposes that instead of playing make believe in Vignot’s attic they should play the game for real, taking a tunnel that leads from the well in Legion Field to a secret military airstrip (Vignot’s absent father had been an agent of the French secret service) at Logan airport. The game takes them to Africa, where the two lead a ruthless uprising against the local governments. Wendell descends into an addled ruthlessness, indulging in atrocities and disgusting his friend. Their string of victories ends abruptly, and Wendell discovers that they are not being blown to smithereens in Africa but are still in Vignot’s attic. Enraged by his friend’s apparent deception, Wendell shoots him with the stolen gun, and leaves to meet Beat as Vignot jots down the last lines of the book.